Obama campaign pushes voter registration on Facebook

10/8/12 9:40 PM EDT

The Obama campaign is using Facebook to make sure supporters are registered to vote.

The data gurus in Chicago are using the social network to encourage voter registration with an app that can check voter registration status — and allows users to "nudge" friends and acquaintances to check their own statuses.

The app — promoted by email to voters in specific states where voter registration deadlines are approaching fast — allows users to check their own registration status using Facebook.

Voter registration is generally a matter of public record. The Obama campaign uses the simple biographical information most users provide to Facebook to check their registration status in the public records.

Once the app confirms a user is registered to vote, it offers to contact twelve of that user's friends to remind them to vote. The users the app suggests are specifically targeted by the campaign.

"It sorts a few ways, including by state for example," a campaign official told POLITICO.

A group of political scientists sent voters a copy of their own voting history, along with the voting histories of their neighbors, and threatened to repeat the mailing after the election. Among voters that received the mailer, turnout was up 20 percent.

Issenberg reports that consultants at the Analyst Institute — a labor-funded consulting firm that works with the Obama campaign — figured out how to turn that experiment into a gentler, less threatening form of persuasion that thanked people for voting in the past rather than threatening to out them as nonvoters in the future.

Another study published in Nature estimated that a single Facebook message was responsible for almost a third of a million voters on election day in 2010. The experiment showed some users a list of their friends who had already reported voting. Those users were more likely to turn out and vote.

The Obama campaign's Facebook efforts are similar — using network effects and gentle reminders from a peer to prod likely supporters into registering and turning out to vote.

UPDATE: The RNC has a similar Facebook tool that fills out a voter registration form for the user, and allows them to mail it in. It also tells voters how many voters the RNC has registered in a given state and asks them to invite their friends. It's a slightly different approach to the same issue — how to ensure that supporters are prepared for election day.